Well…. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but 2020 has been an interesting year.
The pandemic, of course, has thrown a monkey in the wrench works. As you can imagine, I had plans for business growth this year. By March, that had come to a screeching halt. It wasn’t because I couldn’t open up a brick and mortar store. It was more the case that when people don’t know where the money is coming from in a week, month, rest of the year… buying art stuff isn’t exactly on their priority list. Being a creative has never been easy even in the best of times. And yet we persist.
For me, the biggest blow came in July when by primary computer up and died on me…taking one of my hard drives with it. Since this was the machine that I did pretty much ALL of my work on — art previz, videos, business, etc. — its loss was keenly felt. Needless to say, even with our current limited situation, I needed to get a replacement. More importantly, I needed to recover my data. I’m ashamed to admit that after over two decades of not having a major, hair-pulling data loss, the past few years have seen me get a little comfortable and lax in regards to data backups. I had them, just not as recent as would be really helpful.
While I was waiting on a machine to arrive so I could start work again, I set to the task of recovering my data. One drive wasn’t affected, so that was 100% saved. Another, critical drive, wasn’t easily readable so I’d have to do recovery. After six days, I got about 98% of the files with the rest being corrupted. Fortunately, nothing I desperately needed was lost. A third drive….well, that was toast. Another seven days of scanning yielded only 0.8% recovery. Fortunately, this was the most expendable drive, so I didn’t cry any tears about it.
So, with September starting, our “new normal” becoming “normal”, and me once again being a minion of our robot overlords, it’s time to get my focus back on creation. Unfortunately, one of the consequences of being old is having a lot of “life” things that need attention — many of them not all that optional. It doesn’t leave as much time in a day as I had when I was thirty years younger. Even so, that’s not reason not to press on.
I’m finishing up my previz for a quick piece of USWNT Football start Megan Rapinoe. As it’s not based on any copyrighted works, I might actually be able to make money on it in much the same way I couldn’t from the Alex Morgan painting. I’m hoping to be slapping paint on canvas in the very near future.
I reactivated my Patreon page. For now, it’s just a donation tier. Until I understand what the community would like as perks, and figuring out how to provide that, I think it’s safest to keep things really simple for now.
Oh…the flute practice is on-going. Because it’s chile season in NM, I’m having to take more days off than I’d like due to fatigue, but I should be back to daily practice soon.
